What is the Priory of Sion?

The publication of The
Da Vinci Code in 2003 has arguably made the PRIORY OF SION the most high
profile ‘SECRET SOCIETY’ in recorded history. According to DAN BROWN, the
Priory of Sion is the pre-eminent GODDESS worshipping CULT on the planet, and
has a FEMINIST pedigree stretching back nearly a thousand years. Millions of
Brown’s adherents have accepted both these claims as ‘fact’, and believe that
the Priory of Sion is an ancient goddess worshipping cult almost a THOUSAND YEARS
OLD.

Many of these
Brown fans also believe that the CATHOLIC CHURCH has spent almost two millennia
attempting to denigrate MARY MAGDALENA, by falsely labelling her a PROSTITUTE.
By doing so ‘the Church’ has also denigrated every woman and femininity as a
whole. According to Brown and those who believe that his claims are accurate,
the ‘Priory of Sion has fought for many centuries to right this wrong’. However,
almost all Da Vinci Code/Sion sceptics
believe that the Priory of Sion is far less than less than a century old and is
nothing more than a FRAUD concocted by a French CONMAN with DELUSIONS OF
GRANDEUR.

These two
viewpoints represent the extremes. On the one side, at least in the English
speaking world, the Priory of Sion is viewed as an ancient order of feminist ‘good
guys’, intent on battling the ‘evils’ of state-sponsored chauvinist ‘PATRIARCHY’.
On the other side, the Priory of Sion is viewed as nothing more than a devious HOAX
perpetrated by the unwholesome on the gullible. And more importantly perhaps,
these ‘hoaxers’ are, according to some Sion sceptics, intimately associated
with the very same ‘Patriarchy’ that is viewed with such hatred by so many
Brown adherents!

However, these
contradictory claims did not just appear after the publication and subsequent
massive publicity associated with the phenomenal sales of The Da Vinci Code. Right from the earliest published literature the
‘facts’ and ‘myths’ associated with the Priory of Sion have been, to say the
very least, highly contradictory. The claim that the Priory of Sion was and is
crucially concerned with feminism did not begin to develop until over two
decades after its first public ‘exposure’.

However, while
the feminist theme was absent from that first exposure, which originated in a
book published in 1962 by the French author GÉRARD DE SÈDE entitled Les Templiers Sont Parmi Nous
(The Templars are Amongst Us), the book nevertheless contained early allusions
to the Magdalene and some cryptic references to the goddess ISIS. This first public reference to the Priory of Sion in the
world of publishing appeared in the Appendix (entitled ‘The Point of View of
the Hermeticist’) of the work in question and took the form of an interview
between de Sède and a man named PIERRE PLANTARD. Plantard is introduced as a
‘HERMETIC’ archaeologist who, it is alluded to, works for the secret services:

·‘A few rare archaeologists still practice a
unique art: the hermetic deciphering of ancient monuments. More often than we
think, civil and religious organizations, and sometimes even the ‘secret services’, use them’ [Italics added] (1) [Gérard de Sède]

Plantard is, of course, of crucial significance to the
whole mystery. According to the various ‘BELIEVERS’, Plantard is no less than
the LINEAL DESCENDENT of Jesus Christ. To the Sion sceptics however, Plantard
is nothing more than an ANTI-SEMITIC conman with delusions of grandeur.

The Priory of
Sion receives its first mention in the world of publishing in the ‘The Point of View of the Hermeticist’ Appendix.
The reference is deliberately vague and cryptic, something that is very typical
of this sort of French ‘Hermeticism’. However, the reference itself has no
other function than to ‘alert’ the careful reader to the ‘existence’ of the
Priory of Sion. First Plantard states that:

·‘Perhaps the miracle
will be achieved there [in the fortress of Gisors]. The traveller, like Jacob,
will have a strange dream: Two Johns will appear to him – one, Cernunnos, the
child of men; the other, Smertullos, the child of God – awaiting the third
coming. While illuminated from within, he sees John baptizing Jesus with
the shell, with the dove present, and then sees John the Evangelist of the
Cross, the Beloved of the heart of Jesus’ (2) [Pierre Plantard].

Then this cryptic passage is annotated with a number
reference. When this reference is checked, it reads simply:

·‘Instruction of the scholars, the rank of
Commander, Priory of Sion’ (3) [Pierre Plantard]

There is no
explanation of what this means or any further reference to a ‘Priory of Sion’. Clearly,
the reference itself has no ‘real’ function other than to ‘alert’ the careful
reader to the existence of a ‘Priory of Sion’, without any elaboration on what
that means exactly.

Prior to the
Priory of Sion’s modern association with ‘matriarchal feminism’, it was linked
with a number of other, seemingly contradictory, themes. The theme that has
perhaps become most inextricably linked with the Sion Mythos, at least as far
as many Sion researchers are concerned, is RENNES-LE-CHÂTEAU, a tiny village
located in southern France. Well over a century ago a man by the name of
Bérenger Saunière became priest of this small mountain top village. Although
his official salary was extremely meagre Saunière would seem to have lived an opulent
life during certain periods. He also built extravagantly, paying for the
construction of a villa and ‘tower’ amongst others things in the village. He
also behaved in ways that many consider extremely suspicious. For ‘believers’,
Saunière either found a lost treasure horde, and/or blackmailed the Church
and/or local aristocracy, and/or acted as high priest in strange magickal
rituals. However, sceptics claim that he was simply a simonist receiving
payment for saying masses that he would never had had the time to actually
preform.

The first widely
circulated publication to link the Priory of Sion to Rennes-le-Château appeared
in France in 1967. It was again a book written by Gérard de Sède and was
entitled L’Or de Rennes (The
Gold of Rennes). Although the book does not mention the Priory of Sion
directly, there were many allusions to it, particularly in diagrams depicting
stones, graves, and other features supposedly found in or around Rennes-le-Château.
More importantly, the book was written with the collaboration of Pierre
Plantard. As Plantard is at the centre of all things Sion, the narrative
presented in The Gold of Rennes is
extremely significant for so many different reasons, not least because it is
the Sion tale as relayed by the supposed Sion grandmaster (4).

It is also crucially
important to note that the de Sède book was quickly rereleased, under the new
title Le Trésor Maudit de
Rennes-le-Château (the Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château), and was
subsequently read by a man named Henry Soskin. Soskin is better known to the
general public by his pseudonym HENRY LINCOLN and was one of the three of
authors who eventually wrote Holy
Blood, Holy Grail, a book that had a massive impact on how the Priory
of Sion was perceived, and which had an extremely powerful influence on Dan
Brown. Holy Blood, Holy Grail will be
examined in due course. For now it will suffice to note that Lincoln was directly
inspired by the work of Gérard de Sède in collaboration with Pierre Plantard.

1973 saw
the publication of Les Dessousd’une
Ambition Politique (Behind the Scenes of a Political Ambition) by ‘Mathieu
Paoli’. That particular author claimed to have uncovered evidence that strongly
indicated that the Priory of Sion is a French nationalist MONARCHIST CONSPIRACY
intent on the restoration of a TRADITIONALIST CATHOLICFrench Monarchy (5).

In that same year
Gérard de Sède published La Race
Fabuleuse (The Fabulous Race), in which he claimed to have inside
information that ‘proved’ that the MEROVINGIANS were descended from a hybrid
race of ANCIENT ISRAELITES and EXTRA-TERRESTRIALSfrom theSIRIUS star-system:

·‘The descendants of
Extra-Terrestrials once reigned over France’ (6) [Gérard de Sède].

According to de Sède, the Priory of Sion is the
Extra-Terrestrials very own secret society, a society which vehemently opposes
to the Vatican!

The most famous
of all Sion books, prior to the publication of The Da Vinci Code, was originally published in 1982. Entitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail it was written by
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and, as already noted, Henry Lincoln. This book
introduced the Priory of Sion to the English speaking world and would become
the inspiration to dozens of other authors, not least Dan Brown. Holy Blood, Holy Grail is one of the
half dozen books mentioned by name in The
Da Vinci Code. The narrative of the latter is so closely based upon Holy Blood, Holy Grail that two the trio
of Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors, Baigent
and Leigh, attempted to sue Dan Brown for plagiarism. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln claimed that the
Priory of Sion is a powerful secret society whose purpose is to protect and
promote a hidden BLOODLINE descended from JESUS CHRIST and MARY MAGDALENA. As
such, it is supposedly vehemently ANTI-VATICAN, if not anti-Christian (7).

In direct
response to the publication of Holy
Blood, Holy Grail an Anglican priest, the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe
(affectionately known as Fanny to his friends), produced Holy Grail Revealed. Despite being a married Christian
priest, Fanthorpe found the idea of a sexually active Jesus both distasteful
and unbelievable. Instead, he offered
up a number of different 'theories' about the Priory of Sion:

·‘The first theory of
the Priory is that it may have originated as a group of very early Roman
Christians, drawing support from Judeo-Christian communities scattered
throughout the Roman Empire, but strongest in the East...The second theory of
the Priory of Sion...[is that it] was the secret inner hierarchy of the
Templars’ (8) [Lionel
Fanthorpe].

Eventually, however, the Reverend Fanthorpe settled on
what, to him at least, was a much more ‘believable’ scenario than a sexually
active Jesus – he instead claimed that members of the Priory of Sion guard:

·‘…a strange artefact,
an inexplicable power source created by some ancient, long-forgotten
technology, brought to Earth in a STARSHIP’ [Emphasis added] (9) [Lionel Fanthorpe]!

Perhaps it might be reasonable to wonder whether Fanny’s
career path as a Christian priest has unduly influenced his views on how the
Priory of Sion, and indeed Jesus, should be understood.

Continuing the Extra-Terrestrial
theme begun by Gérard de Sède and continued by the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe,
the author David Wood claimed in his 1985 book, GenIsis, to have uncovered evidence that links the Priory of
Sion to both the lost island of ATLANTIS and Extra-Terrestrials who
‘terra-formed’ part of the southern France countryside, around
Rennes-le-Château, to resemble A GIANT VAGINA. He was one of the first authors
to claim that the Priory of Sion specifically worships a goddess, in this case
an ancient Egyptian goddess called Nut. Wood further claims that on initiation,
all new Sion members are ritually CASTRATED. Apparently new Sion members store
their newly dismembered members in an ancient communal sacred jar. Jesus was
also, according to Wood, castrated in this manner, so presumably His ancient
mummified penis might still be found in the Sion sacred penis jar (10).

In that same year
the author Ean Begg expanded on the claims made by Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln
in his book The Cult of the Black
Virgin, a book of particular significance in the evolutionary path of
the Priory of Sion:

·‘Books about Black
Virgins prior to 1982 did not concern themselves with the Priory of Sion or the
fortunes of the Merovingian dynasty, and it was not my original intention to
break with that precedent. Holy Blood,
Holy Grail made no mention of Black Virgins, but one of the authors alerted
me to a possible correlation between them and the Priory. Then I read
Rennes-le-Château in which Brétigny and Deloux refer to the Black Virgins…in
the context of the Priory and its history. As my researches continued, it
became increasingly obvious that the cult of the Black Virgin and the history
of the Merovingian bloodline were inextricably linked’ (11) [Ean Begg].

Begg continued the goddess theme and arguably BEGAN the
feminist theme by claiming that the Priory of Sion was:

·‘…passionately
concerned with the cult of the Black Virgin and has a remarkable record of
equal rights for women’ (12).

Begg made the ‘equal rights for women’ claim solely because
four of the twenty-six supposed Priory of Sion ‘Grandmasters’ were supposedly
women. But of course, sceptics have dismissed the Grandmaster list as nothing
more than pure fantasy, which would mean that the Priory of Sion has no history
of ‘equal rights for women’, simply because the Priory of Sion has no history
prior to 1956. Begg also claimed that the Priory of Sion worshipped the BLACK VIRGIN
as Mary Magdalena. By doing so, he made the Magdalene something more than the
‘mere’ wife of ‘God incarnate in the flesh’, beginning a process that would
eventually culminate in the complete reversal of roles presented in The Da Vinci Code, where Brown presents
Jesus as a mere mortal and the Magdalene as a divine LIVING GODDESS.

In 1986, in a
book entitled Hermes Unveiled,
the author Roy Norvill claimed that the Priory of Sion is the modern
incarnation of an ancient order of ROSICRUCIAN and ALCHEMICAL ADEPTS, intent on
educating those with eyes to see and ears to hear:

·‘The story of the
Templars begins in 1090, when Christendom remobilised to capture the city of
Jerusalem…Godfrey de Bouillon…was offered the crown of the city by a mysterious
group of religious figures known as the Order of Our Lady of Mount Sion. Look
closely at the title. ‘Our Lady’ is none other than the Virgin – in former
times, Isis – while Mount Sion has the inner meaning of the subconscious. This
Order was obviously one that followed the Hermetic path. And it was from the
ranks of this mysterious sect that the Templars evolved.

The origin of the
Knights Templars is mentioned in an historical document, the chronicle of
William of Tyre (1160), and it is in this screed that the discerning reader
will encounter traces of a hidden message. According to the text, the first
Templars were nine in number (9). Led by Hugh de
Payens, they went to Jerusalem, their appointed task being to keep the roads to the Holy Land safe –
with especial regard for the protection of pilgrims.
The king of Jerusalem looked favourably on their ideal and allowed them to stay
in one whole wing of his palace, which happened to have been built on the very
spot occupied by the original Temple of
Solomon. Hence the name Templars.

To extract the
real message from this slightly fictitious item of history, we have only to
centre our attention on the introduction of the Temple of Solomon, and knowing
that famous edifice to be a symbol of the inner mind, we extend the symbolism
to the palace of the king of Jerusalem. Aware now of what to look for, we read
the text again to find that the Templars were nine in number (a reference to the ‘scala philosophorum’, the
Hermetic Ladder which has nine rungs). The Templars’ task was to keep the roads
to the Holy Land safe, and as the ‘Holy Land’ is another reference to this
inner mind, we gather that the Order’s intention is to maintain the secret
tradition of the Hermeticists. Especial regard…is afforded pilgrims. In the
Hermetic parlance, a ‘pilgrim’ is a Neophyte – one who wishes to undertake the
mental process.

The number nine
is repeated later in William’s document, in a statement declaring that the
Templars pursued their activities for nine years, during which time they
excavated the ruins under the palace and came upon the ruined stables of King
Solomon. To decipher this, I ask you only to recall the Katha-Upanishad with
its ‘horses’ of the conscious mind and you will see that this is just another
way of saying that the Templars were in the Hermetic business. The documents
also notes that five of the original ‘nine’ Templars were brothers of the
founder organisation, the Order of Our Lady of Mount Sion.

As you can now
appreciate, the document of William of Tyre was written by an initiate, and in
the formation of the Knights Templars we are presented with a situation where a
secret organisation (Our Lady of Mount Sion) remains in the background, but
initiates and controls another, more open society to which non-initiates might
be attracted. In this scheme you will find the beginning of a recurring,
historical pattern’ (13) [Roy Norvill].

Again, the influence
of Holy Blood, Holy Grail should be
clear to the reader.

In the same year,
in the wonderfully titled Refuge
of the Apocalypse: Doorway into Other Dimensions, the authoress Elizabeth Van Buren continued the alchemical
theme, while also claiming the Priory of Sion guarded a secret refuge, found
perhaps predictably around Rennes-le-Chteau, from a coming APOCALYPSE. ‘There
will be earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods, such as have not been
experienced for thousands of years. Weather patterns will change, become
confused, and the planet’s food supplies will diminish each year. There will be
famine throughout the Earth. There will be war, and injustice and man’s violent
nature will be revealed to be like that of a WOLF. The blackness will grow ever
more dense’ (14).

1986 also saw the
publication of The Messianic Legacy,
the follow-up book to Holy Blood, Holy
Grail by the authors Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln. In this book the trio
have become somewhat more suspicious of the Priory of Sion, and the information
that they believe the Priory has disseminated. They began to discover possible Sion
links with various INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES and groups that seem to be inimical
with what they had thought was the Sion agenda, perhaps even indicating that
Sion was associated with an ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE Catholic ANTI-COMMUNIST conspiracy
linked to the ultra-right wing pseudo-Masonic group known as P2. P2 was, and
perhaps still is, a group that would seem to have been created to prevent a Socialist/Communist
government from taking power in Italy, particularly during the so-called Cold
War (15).

In 1988 a book
written by one of the original architects of the whole Priory of Sion mythology
was published that attempted to debunk the whole Jesus bloodline concept. In Rennes-le-Château: The Files, the
Impostures, the Fantasies, the Hypotheses the author Gérard de Sède
dismissed the claims of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, David Wood, and Elizabeth
Van Buren as fantasy, which is perhaps somewhat ironic given that it was he who
both introduced the Priory of Sion to the publishing world and first linked it
to Extra-Terrestrials (16)!

In 1989 a Traditionalist
Christian author named J.R. Church claimed, in Guardians of the Grail, that the Priory of Sion is an
anti-Christian MASONIC conspiracy:

·‘…the Order of the KNIGHTS
TEMPLAR was, at first, only a front organisation for a more secretive group
known as the Priory of Sion, whose real purpose was to capture the wealth of
the world, establish their own world government, and introduce a Merovingian
king to sit upon a throne in Jerusalem. They are said to be the true possessors
of the [Jewish] Temple treasury and the behind-the-scenes controllers of the
world’s currencies’ [Emphasis added] (17) [J.R. Church].

Church claims that the Priory of Sion is led by theANTI-CHRIST. The purpose of the ‘Order’
is to place the Anti-Christ on a newly created ‘THRONE OF EUROPE’. This event will
supposedly trigger ‘ARMAGEDDON’.

Through the 70s
and 80s the Priory of Sion was linked, rightly or wrongly, with bloodlines,
politics, and extra-terrestrials. There was also some association with alchemy.
From the 90s on, this supposed association with alchemy became more explicate
as Sion began to be linked with various types of SEX CULT. In her/his 1990 booklet
Inside the Men’s Club ‘Hawthorne
Abendsen’ claimed that the Priory of Sion is a HOMOSEXUAL sex cult joined
exclusively by males who worship al-Shaddai, the God of War and the ‘subjugation
of women’. According to ‘Abendsen’, the Priory of Sion is a sect that is
thousands of years old, and whose central rituals involve violence, bloodshed, RITUAL
SACRIFICE, murder, war, and homosexual ORGIES (18). ‘Abendsen’s’ claim of ritualistic homosexual orgies are perhaps
incompatible with David Wood’s claim of Sion eunuchs, and maybe even Dan
Brown’s pagan sex rites. ‘Abendsen’s’ claim about Sion subjugation of women is also
obviously at odds with Brown’s claim about Sion ‘goddess worship’.

The next book to
mention the Priory of Sion was also greatly inspired by Holy Blood, Holy Grail and like that book, was mentioned by name by
Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Entitled The Woman with the Alabaster Jar,
the authoress, Margaret Starbird continues the sexual theme by claiming that:

·‘Institutional
Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand
years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine…: the denial of the
feminine. For years I had a vague feeling that something was radically wrong
with my world; that for too long the feminine in our culture had been scorned
and devalued. But it was not until 1985 that I encountered documented evidence
of a devastating fracture in the Christina story. On the recommendation of a
close friend who knew of my intense interest in Judeo-Christian scriptures and
the origins of Christianity, I read a book in April 1985 entitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ (19) [Margaret Starbird].

Starbird, at least at this early stage of her research,
accepted mostly as ‘fact’ the various claims made by Baigent, Leigh, and
Lincoln, about a hidden bloodline descended from Jesus and the Magdalene.
However she elaborated upon those claims by suggesting that Jesus and Mary
Magdalena were EQUAL PARTNERS in a royal pagan marriage that involved ancient
sacred sexual rituals. These claims were subsequently of great influence on Dan
Brown. Like the Holy Blood, Holy Grail
authors, Starbird believes the Priory of Sion was founded to protect the
bloodline supposedly descended from this marriage. According to Starbird the
Priory of Sion practiced a secret, rival form of Christianity – a Church of AMOR
(Love) in direction opposition to the Church of ROMA (Rome), with the Magdalene
as ‘royal matriarch’.

Sion researcher Lynn
Picknett has also claimed that the Priory of Sion is a sex cult. According to
Picknett, as outlined in her 1994 book entitled Turin Shroud – In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled,
a member of the Priory of Sion contacted her secretly and supposedly informed
her that the ‘Order’ was behind the creation of the Shroud of Turin (20), apparently to
discredit orthodox Roman Christianity! Her Sion ‘Deep-throat’ also supposedly
informed her that the image on the Shroud was actually a primitive photograph
of Leonardo da Vinci, supposedly one time Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion.

In The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardian
of the True Identity of Christ, published in 1997, Picknett claimed
that the Priory of Sion hates Jesus and Christianity. Jesus was, she claimed, a
failed SEX MAGICIAN who eventually became a jealous, murdering ‘FALSE MESSIAH’.
According to Picknett, members of the Priory of Sion actually worship JOHN THE
BAPTIST as the ‘TRUE MESSIAH’ and the Magdalena as his ‘SEXUAL INITIATRIX’. Puzzlingly,
however, while claiming that John was the Jewish Messiah she also claims that he
(and also Jesus and the Magdalene) was a Pagan rather than a Jew. According to
Picknett, Sion members supposedly practice ancient pagan sex magic, and have
done so right up until modern times (21). The Templar
Revelation was also another of the handful of books mentioned by name in The Da Vinci Code.

However, it is perhaps also worth pointing out that although
Picknett’s work is cited by Brown, and she and her publishers have claimed that
she was the major influence on Brown, she herself utterly rejects the validity
of the so-called Jesus bloodline hypothesis. She doesn't believe that Mary
Magdalena was either wife to Jesus or mother to His hypothetical children. As
the hypothetical 'Jesus bloodline' is the crucial theme running throughout the Da Vinci Code narrative, Picknett’s
influence on Dan Brown must be limited to her personal interpretation of the
art work of Leonardo de Vinci.

The
following year, in 1998, in a very rare and difficult to obtain booklet, entitled The
Unknown Treasure: the Priory of Sion Fraud and the Spiritual Treasure of Rennes-le-Cheteau,
the author Robert Richardson claimed that:

·‘The Priory of Sion is
a front organisation for another group.
The group behind the Priory of Sion was founded in the 1920s under the
direction of a man named George Monti, who is referenced in Priory publications
as ‘Count Israel Monti’ [Italics added] (22) [Robert Richardson]

According to Richardson, the Priory of Sion was/is a front
for a Rightist SYNARCHIST political conspiracy:

·‘By the 1880s a man
named Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre began to write about a new idea
for governing society…It was called SYNARCHY. Synarchy – or joint rule –
combines the esoteric and the political. Its aim is a restoration of spiritual
values in society. The medium is through an elect band of spiritual initiates.
These initiates effectuate change by influencing groups which represent
different aspects of society. These groups then influence their spheres, which
in turn influence and modify societal structure, government, and culture. The
model for Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was the Knights Templar. He saw the Templars as
secretly controlling the direction of society in their time in exactly this way.
Where the Church was obsessed with the redemption of individual souls, the
Knights Templar concerned themselves with the redemption and reformation of
entire sectors of society, and ultimately with the social order itself. The
Templars embodied the principle of the spiritual elect, living a spiritual
focused life yet fully engaged in the material world…Saint-Yves d’Alveydre
believed the key point in time when western civilization turned for the worse
was the betrayal of the Templars by the Church and Monarchy in 1307. For him,
the return of Templar principles would lead to the creation of an ideal
society…By the 1920s, politically active Masonic groups with distinctly
synarchist policies were a reality in France’ (23) [Robert Richardson].

It is perhaps worth noting that in 2006, in The Sion Revelation, Lynn Picknett
changed her mind and began claiming that the Priory of Sion is a SYNARCHIST
conspiracy (24). Interestingly, she makes absolutely no mention of Robert
Richardson in her bibliography or index, despite the fact that his synarchist
claims were extremely well known on the Internet by 2006! It is also perhaps
understandably that Picknett is somewhat reluctant to accept that her first
‘expert investigation’ into the Priory of Sion (The Templar Revelation, see above) was somewhat flawed, so she has
tried to amalgamate the two ‘expert investigations’ into one arguably confusing
‘revelation’ (The Sion Revelation),
but with a few less dominatrix and ritual orgies.

The other authoress
already mentioned who claims that the Priory of Sion is a sex cult is Twacy
Twyman. Again, Holy Blood, Holy Grail
was a seminal influence. As she writes in her 2004 book, entitled The Merovingian Mythos and the Mystery of
Rennes-le-Château:

·‘As a researcher…I
have often felt the spine-tingling sensation of the Devil himself breathing
down my neck, and the presence of praeterhuman intelligences guiding me down
the path towards revelation…I discovered the answers to age-old questions, and
revealed ancient secrets that have lain untouched in the dusty catacombs of
dead history for thousands of years. Most
of those secrets, I knew, would be of incalculable value to scholarship, and to
humanity as a whole, once I was able to publish them…The primary impetus
for my interest in this mystery was, as it is for many Grail researchers, the
publication of the best-selling Holy Blood, Holy Grail Michael Baigent, Henry
Lincoln, Richard Leigh’ [Italics added] (19) [Twacy Twyman].

Indeed, Twyman relies so much on Holy Blood, Holy Grail that is fair to say that much of The Merovingian Mythos is simply a
rehash, with very little addition, of Holy
Blood, Holy Grail. She also accepts almost everything in Holy Blood, Holy Grail as factually accurate,
and unfortunately formulates her claims from that extremely dubious position.

According to
Twyman the Priory of Sion sex cult is neither specifically goddess nor pagan
nor even homosexually orientated, but is instead a SATANIC sex cult.

·‘…Jesus and Mary
Magdalene may have been the leaders of a royal sex magic cult, with the
Magdalene performing the role of a “temple priestess” or a “sacred prostitute”.
Obviously, if this were true, then the belief system that Jesus represented was
well outside of mainstream Judaism. Indeed, he and Magdalene were most likely
followers of strange Satanic gods, the worship of whom involved sexual
magic…Mary Magdalene’s status as a Benjamite princess may have made her
especially qualified to act as a SACRED PROSTIUTE, as the Benjamites were
associated specifically with the performance of rituals for strange gods’ [Emphasis
added] (25) [Twacy
Twyman].

These various references to sex cults and sacred
prostitution are worth noting, as they bring the first section of this study
full circle, and illustrate the general confusion associated with both the Sion
and ‘Bloodline’ narratives. Twyman, like both Margaret Starbird and Lynn
Picknett, who are, of course, the female authoresses specifically mentioned by
Brown in The Da Vinci Code, claim, in
one way or another, that the Magdalene was a sacred prostitute. Yet, like
Brown, each of these authors excoriates the Christian tradition that claims the
Magdalene was a prostitute:

·‘This is the woman who
singlehandedly could crumble the Church?

“Who is she?” Sophie asked.

“That, my dear,” Teabag replied, “is
Mary Magdalene”.

Sophie turned. “The prostitute?”

Teabag drew a short breath, as if
the word had injured him personally. “Magdalene
was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear
campaign launched by the early Church. The Church needed to defame Mary
Magdalene in order to cover up her dangerous secret – her role as the Holy
Grail”’ [Italics added] (26) [Dan Brown].

Of course, many will argue that there is a great difference
between a prostitute and a sacred prostitute, but is it entirely reasonable to
expect this ‘difference’ to be acknowledged by devout followers of a rival
religious tradition such as Christianity?

It might also be
worth noting that many seem to think that linking the Magdalene with sacred
prostitution is more than acceptable, and casts her in an extremely positive
manner, while just as many seem to think that associating her with ‘mundane’
prostitution completely and utterly demeans her memory. Some thought should perhaps
go to the many millions of female prostitutes in modern society who might be
both deeply hurt and deeply offended by the obvious contempt that they and
their profession are held in by both ‘the Church’ and supposedly pro-women writers
such as Brown, Starbird, and Picknett.

All of this, of
course, eventually culminated in The Da
Vinci Code, where the Priory of Sion is portrayed as an arch-feminist
secret society that has, for over a thousand years, supposedly protected a
bloodline supposedly descended from the mere mortal preacher Jesus Christ and his divine wife Mary Magdalena. In Brown’s version the faith of the
whole Earth literally rests in the goddess worshipping hands of the members of
the Priory of Sion. Without their help and guidance human society and perhaps
the whole Earth itself is at risk of destruction from a ‘male ego [that] has
spent two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart’ (27).

Even the most
credulous conspiracy theorist would have to accept that some of these claims
about the Priory of Sion must be bogus, simply because so many of the claims
are contradictory. However each of the various authors claims to have uncovered
the ‘shocking truth’, although almost all have created a different scenario. So
is the Priory of Sion pro-papal or anti-papal? Is the Priory of Sion
pro-Christian or anti-Christian? Is the Priory of Sion Matriarchal or Patriarchal?
Is the Priory of Sion a homosexual sex cult paying homage to the God of War, or
is it a group of Goddess worshipping eunuchs, or even a satanic sex cult?Or could it really be a violently
anti-Vatican Catholic Monarchist conspiracy, most frequently joined by Satanist
Jewish Freemasons, who become Goddess worshipping homosexual eunuchs, and who
wish to subjugate women for al-Shaddai, the God of War, while protecting a
bloodline descended from Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene and aliens from the
star-system Sirius?

As a final point,
it perhaps worth noting an issue raised by the judge, Justice Peter Smith, who
presided over the doomed Baigent and Leigh legal attempt to get their hands on
some of Dan Brown’s money. As outlined above, Justice Smith commented that:

·‘[Dan Brown] has presented himself as being
a deep and thorough researcher for all of the books he produced. [However] the
reality of his research is that it is superficial’.

Unfortunately, it is a reality of the pseudo-historical
genre that research is generally superficial, or even more unfortunately, that
‘research’ is more often than not nothing much more than opinion presented as
‘fact’, and ‘fact’ that is often misrepresented to manipulate the reader. This
issue is crucial to the pseudo-historical genre, particularly as authors
desperately attempt to ‘sex up’ their claims to attract the attention of a
fickle audience.

It is common to
read reviews, particularly by ‘amateur’ reviewers, that claim this or that
pseudo-historical book is ‘well researched’. However, it is generally the case
that such reviewers simply read a particular book and accept the accuracy of
the various ‘facts’ within, and limit their review to an examination of the
author’s claim or hypothesis as extrapolated from those ‘facts’. Unfortunately,
when these ‘facts’ are not ‘facts’ at all, the whole premise of a particular
pseudo-historical piece can become untenable even before the ‘evidence’ is
interpreted.

Take, for
example, Twacy Twyman, the last authoress mentioned above. She discusses the
possibility that the Priory of Sion was the ‘real power’ behind the ultra-Rightist,
pro-Catholic, pseudo-Masonic, counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation P2.
This secret organisation reached to the very highest levels of power in Italy
and committed numerous serious crimes. Many also suspect that P2 played a major
part in the 1980 Bologna Bombing, in which eighty-five people were killed.
According to Twyman:

·‘It was during the
1960’s that the CIA began distributing funds to its favoured groups through the
Vatican’s own bank. This was done with the help of a shadowy, pro-Catholic,
anti-Communist Masonic lodge known as P2…All this came out in the Italian press
when a massive banking scandal broke involving the official Vatican bank, Banco
Ambrosiano, and P2. The main figures implicated were P2 members Michael Sindona
(a high ranking official in the bank and P2’s financier) and the lodge’s
Grandmaster Licio Gelli. Gelli was a man with far-right viewpoints who, after
the scandal broke, was found hanging from Blackfriar’s Bridge in London in
1982, in manner consistent with masonic ritual’ [Twacy Twyman] (28).

The possibility of an association between P2 and the people
behind the Priory of Sion will be examined as this study progresses. For now,
it will suffice to simply note that, while this passage might seem to some
people ‘well researched’ and full of information, the truth is LICIO GELLI was
NOT found hanging under Blackfriar’s Bridge. The man found hanging in London
was banker Roberto Calvi. Licio Gelli is still alive, as of 2011, and currently
involved in making a film about his life, provisional entitled The Conspirator! So, while the above
passage is perhaps wellwritten, it is NOT at all well researched. Someone reading the
above passage, who is not familiar with the subject matter and does not take
time to fact-check, will simply assume the data is correct because it is
presented in a seemingly well-written published work.

One more example of
this superficial ‘research’ should suffice for now:

·‘Godfrey de Bouillon
was…”Defender of the Holy Sepulcher” [sic] of Jerusalem, and was succeeded by
his brother Baldwin, who took the title “King of Jerusalem”. This title was
then passed onto Fulk the Black from the French Angevin dynasty. (Merovingian descendent),
who married Godfrey’s daughter Melusine…she remains in the genealogies of many
prominent noble families in Europe, and her son Geoffrey d’Anjou, became the
first Plantagenet king of England. Geoffrey, and indeed all of the Plantagenet
kings, were known for their hot temper, and thus Saint Columba (who was
instrumental in the creation of the Knights Templar) said of Geoffrey that
“From the Devil he has come, and to the Devil he’ll return”’ (24) [Twacy Twyman].

Ok. So this passage seems absolutely loaded with
‘historical information’. However, it is almost all inaccurate. The ‘Fulk’ that
received the crown of Jerusalem was Fulk the Younger, not Fulk the Black. Fulk
the Black lived and died almost a century earlier. Nor was Godfrey de Bouillon ever
married or even a father. He therefore had no daughter named Melusine who could
have married Fulk, whether Black or Younger. However, Godfrey’s supposed
‘cousin’ (the exact blood relationship between the two has not been
established), not his brother, King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, had a daughter
Melisende (not to be confused with the legendary Melusine), who did marry Fulk
the Younger. Again, however, this Melisende was not the mother of Geoffrey
d’Anjou. Geoffrey d’Anjou’s mother was Countess Ermengarde of Maine, who was
Fulk the Younger’s first wife. Also, Geoffrey d’Anjou was not the first
Plantagenet king of England. That honour went to his son, Henry II. And the
reference to Saint Columba is arguably the most confusing of all. Saint Columba
lived during the 6th century, which is, of course, over five hundred
years before the period in question. Twyman
is probably confusing Saint Columba with Saint Bernard.

In fairness to
Twyman she is far from the only author that undertakes such superficial ‘research’.
Unfortunately, the revisionist history genre is riddled with extremely basic
errors such as these, and it this that allows this field of study to be portrayed
in such a poor manner by sceptics. This is very regrettable because
undoubtedly, parts of history do indeed need to be re-examined and
re-interpreted. As a final note it is perhaps worth noting that Twyman is often
contacted by TV, radio, and other media, to appear as an ‘expert’ on all things
Priory of Sion!

This study will, over
the following chapters, attempt to unravel the mystery that is the Priory of
Sion. It will attempt to start at the very beginning of the Priory of Sion’s
known history and build forward from there, examining each of the various
Priory of Sion incarnations, layer by layer, until the reader has a
comprehensive understanding of the development of the SION MYTHOS. This study
will also attempt to examine, as accurately as possible, how each of the
numerous SION THEMES has become entwined within the overall mystery with each
passing decade. As such, the simple aim of this study is to lay bare: